Well well well. Common names get thrown about and applied pretty randomly, so maybe **some**one calls mountain laurel shad tree, but I'd misunderstood my father: he wasn't saying that mountain laurel = shad tree; he was saying that there's another tree that blooms at the same time that's called that.

Searching on Wikipedia, I find that the genus Amelanchier has several species that get called shad tree or shadbush (they also get called things like serviceberry, a name I know I hear a lot).

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It's serviceberry around here, or, more accurately, sarviceberry (how many born here pronounce it). Here it gets mixed up with the native syringa, which looks a lot like it but blooms later (and has slightly different leaves)